Hayden

Elk-Lake Serenade
Hardwood / Spunk, 2004

Elk-Lake Serenade is bookended by two very strange and beautiful love songs. The first one, 'Wide Eyes', begins with a desperate plea to a stranger on the bus: "I'm getting off at the next stop/ Will you leave with me, so that we can be seen/ By my old love, who's standing over there?/ She left me so stunned that I walk around scared." Hayden lets the lines flow out of him slowly, in a baritone deeper than the ocean, and as if all those hundreds of tonnes of water were weighing down upon his every heartbroken word.

"And so it went like that," he continues. "She agreed to get off/ With me by her side, three blocks from her stop/ As we stepped to the street, she kissed my cheek/ And whispered words that I won't repeat." The song reaches its climax not with a burst of fireworks but the smallest of small comforts. Hayden's voice lifts ever so slightly as the focus of his attention turns. "I think that she saw us, but I didn't look up to see/ Wrap your warm arms around me and let's go get something to eat," he sings to his saviour.

In contrast to 'Wide Eyes', the album's last track – a bonus tacked on to the domestic release of Elk-Lake Serenade and titled simply 'Australia' – is up-beat and confident. So confident, in fact, that it's about stealing someone's girlfriend. "When he brings you along to hear my songs/ He does not realise, that I'm looking in your eyes/ And every time I've been here, I've sung only into your ears," Hayden sings to a girl in the crowd. "So I'll use these lines to tell you that I'm/ Never playing this town again if you don't take my hand."

There's no machismo about the main character, though – no sense of competition with the girl's boyfriend. "I hope he loves you so much he just lets you go/ And comes to the show when we're back in town and I sing/ All the songs that I've written about you and I..." he daydreams. Then everything trails off and there's a pause. When Hayden's voice returns for the final two words, it's with an unexpected sense of warmth and affection.

"... And him."